FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT - PAGE 5

Henry Hampton, 58, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker whose series "Eyes on the Prize" was hailed by many critics as the definitive look at the nation's early struggle over civil rights, died Sunday in Boston.Mr. Hampton had the bone marrow disease myelodysplasia, which arose from a treatment for lung cancer. He had surgery last week to repair a hematoma in his brain, said his nephew, Jacob ben-David Zimmerman.A lifelong chronicler of the poor and the disenfranchised, Mr. Hampton began his career in 1963 as a spokesman for the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston, a strong voice in the civil-rights movement.

SELMA, Ala. -- Two of the Democratic Party's leading presidential candidates came to an emotionally evocative touchstone of the civil rights movement yesterday seeking to strengthen their bonds with black voters and tie their campaigns to the cause's unfinished work. It was the first side-by-side appearance of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton in their 2008 presidential campaign, and the political theater of the two campaigns overlapped repeatedly, but with a polite tone that contrasted with their political skirmishing of recent weeks.

MOST AMERICANS believe that our society is too uncivil, too impolite. Our politics become mean-spirited and cynical. People yelling at each other on television passes as entertainment. Daily interactions grow more suspicious and mistrustful. We size each other up as members of competing, even antithetical, identity groups.We desperately want to make things different, yet we don't have the slightest idea what ''civil'' and ''civility'' requires -- or means. Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday provides an opportunity to reflect on another important use of the word ''civil'' -- the civil-rights movement.

Have black folks in 2005 failed Rosa Parks? Parks died Monday in Detroit. She has been called the "mother of the civil rights movement," and it has been said for years that her refusal to give up a seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white man sparked the nonviolent protests that characterized the "modern" civil rights movement. That's an arguable assertion, at best. James Farmer, who for years was the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, was involved in nonviolent protests, freedom rides and boycotts in the 1940s, years before Parks refused to yield to Alabama's idiotic segregation laws in 1955.

NO ONE has done more to energize the civil rights movement and improve race relations in the United States than Thurgood Marshall. The Baltimore native was a juggernaut smashing through the obstacles of racial injustice.Long before Martin Luther King Jr. and others took to the streets to appeal to the American conscience, Marshall won the crucial battles that built, block by block, the legal pillars of monumental change. He will be remembered as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, but his most important contributions to society came decades before.

The Race Beat Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff Knopf / 518 pages / $30 Like aging veterans of a long-past war, the news reporters who covered the civil rights movement half a century ago spend a lot of time these days in misty-eyed reunions. At these gatherings, inevitably someone would ask anxiously, "What have you heard about Gene's book?" After all, 15 years had passed since Gene Roberts retired after a distinguished career in daily journalism and committed himself to write a history of how "the race beat" was covered.

Dr. Peter B. Levy was a Columbia University graduate student living in an apartment house on East 14th Street near New York City's Union Square when he realized that one of his neighbors was one of the civil rights movement's earliest heroes. "It was Gloria Richardson," said Levy, 50, a native of Northern California who holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and a master's and doctorate from Columbia. Levy, a professor of American history at York College of Pennsylvania, specializes in the 1960s, and he teaches and writes about the civil rights movement.

To many, that is a year when it seemed that the center would not hold - on campuses throughout America, in Paris and Prague, in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, in Washington where marchers converged, in Vietnam where war raged. And, of course, in Los Angeles and Memphis, the cities where the year's turbulence was punctuated with the sound of an assassin's bullets cutting down Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King. King would have turned 77 today. He died at a time when youth was paramount, but it still seems hard to believe that he was only 39 when killed.

ATLANTA -- In the four decades since the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the nation has undergone a stunning social and political transformation that even Dr. King may not have anticipated. The average 25-year-old would have a hard time imagining what the country was like before. No Tiger Woods or Oprah Winfrey or Will Smith. No Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice or Barack Obama. No black presidents in disaster movies or black babies in diaper commercials. That was my childhood.

Konstantinos "Dino" Yannopoulos, 83, a vocal director whose 50-year career included prestigious opera companies and schools around the world, died April 6 in Philadelphia. He was director of the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia from 1977 to 1987 and artistic director from 1987 to 1989. Mr. Yannopoulos was principal director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1945 to 1977. He also was head of the opera department of the Curtis Institute, artistic director of the Vancouver International Festival and director of the Cincinnati Summer Opera.